


Ways to Kill a Man

by marginaliana



Category: House MD
Genre: Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-07-04
Updated: 2006-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-04 16:08:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginaliana/pseuds/marginaliana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>House had died many small deaths and a couple of big ones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ways to Kill a Man

**Author's Note:**

> Set during "No Reason." Written for [](http://community.livejournal.com/house_month/profile)[**house_month**](http://community.livejournal.com/house_month/) [prompt 2](http://community.livejournal.com/house_month/990.html).

They say a coward dies a thousand deaths. House hadn't managed that, but sometimes he thought he'd gotten close.

He'd died for real once, during the time of the infarction, but he hardly remembered that now. What he remembered was the death of what little faith he still had in other people. The doctors crowded around him, shoes squeaking, white lab coats billowing like cloaks as they rushed to and from the hospital bed, waving defibrillators and penlights like the instruments of an arcane medical ritual. After that, Stacy had been the one to hammer the nail home.

During his date with Cameron, he'd felt acutely the death of his patience. House wished she could decide on their roles – half of her seemed to want House as her prince, riding on a white horse and leading the charge of virtue through tree-lined avenues; the other half was determined she would be the savior of him, her attentions piercing House's defenses, slipping inside the iron cage he'd built to keep out the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But the banquet she'd prepared fell flat, and he thought perhaps soon enough she would offer the flag of surrender.

It wasn't only special occasions that had brought deaths. House's daily life was more than enough, considering – the miles of paperwork he waded through, laced with the pitfalls of Cuddy's wrath, not to mention his physical difficulties, legal fallout, more paperwork, plagues, rats, a dozen shitty songs on the radio just when he wanted one perfect moment, and all those rounds in the clinic for which he was forced to steel himself. All these things contributed to the slow death of whatever precarious contentment he'd managed to gain.

When he was shot, it was a second real death, but this time everything was more vivid in his mind. There was an ocean of space separating him from the shooter, but the bullet passed through it in an instant. A nation's scientists and several factories had come together to make that gun, House thought idly, his mind moving even faster than the bullet, and yet ultimately it was one small finger on one small switch that did the damage. Doubtless whatever he'd done to anger the shooter had seemed small at the time, too, but without knowing it he'd pulled the trigger on a man who was probably the culmination of two systems of government and ten thousand other influences. As he fell, House wondered if they'd be able to get the blood out of the carpet and hoped no one would need to use his office for several years.

When he came to on the gurney with Cameron's face above him, House wondered if he was about to experience another death. It wasn't the death of his dignity, which was long gone, or the death of his faith in himself, although that had certainly taken a beating in recent years. Those were cumbersome deaths. Instead, he saw stretching out in front of him the simple, direct, neat death of possibility. A life unchanging, a coward's life of letting these fractional deaths eat away at him, one by one, until only a shell remained, continuing a life without meaning – this, he thought, would be the ultimate death.

Fighting death for the first time, he opened his mouth and spoke.


End file.
